Just across the wires today: Amazon has reached a deal with California lawmakers to drop Amazon’s efforts to seek a referendum to stop CA pols from assessing sales tax on internet transactions forwarded to Amazon.com from CA websites. In exchange for Amazon suspending its efforts, CA will not attempt to collect the tax for one year.
There is also a legal challenge looming for this law as well. CA politicians are not eager to have their taxes deemed unconstitutional by a court, and I suspect that Amazon was hoping to avoid the costs of litigating this issue. Both sides want to avoid a fight and that was probably the impetus for this deal. This is good news for CA consumers and those many small businesses that have website feeds to Amazon .com and other large internet sellers.
But, it would have been better news if they had driven a stake through the heart of the beast now, rather than leave it on the table for next year.